Switchblade 0.90

A free portable troubleshooting toolkit for expert PC users

By Mike Williams | Aug 28, 2013

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Switchblade is an interesting portable troubleshooting toolkit which brings together lots of popular free tools, and adds a few extras of its own. Extract the download to a USB stick and you'll be equipped to diagnose and solve all kinds of PC problems.

Is a system having issues with internet or network connectivity, for instance? Check Switchblade's "Network" section and you'll find buttons to perform various useful actions: ping Google, list the PC's network interfaces, flush its DNS cache, and more.

The program also provides easy access to a host of tools to help you with more complex tasks. Direct download links for Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, Microsoft Security Essentials and ComboFix will detect and remove malware, for instance. Error Lookup will convert Windows error codes into meaningful text. Regshot can take and compare snapshots of your Registry, then show you what's changed. And you also get copies of PuTTY, Notepad++, FileZilla, Revo Uninstaller, Autoruns, TrueCrypt and Media Player Classic.

The package also benefits from some powerful system monitoring and tracking tools. Process Explorer and Process Hacker provide a detailed view of all the processes running on your PC, for instance. LastActivityView is great at revealing precisely what your PC's users have been doing recently. And AppCrashView helps you review the records of any recent system crashes.

And to round off the toolset, there are buttons to grab the PC's event logs (they're copied to your USB stick for later analysis), install the K-Lite Codec pack, and back up or restore the system's drivers. While a set of links highlight useful web sites, including (for instance) the Nvidia and Radeon driver download pages.

Some of the programs included here seem a little odd. Does an emergency maintenance toolkit really need a defrag utility, for instance? PCs don't normally require defragging as a matter of urgency, and even if they do, the standard Windows option is perfectly adequate.

Still,the toolkit does provide plenty of useful utilities and options, though. And so while we'd want to extend it by downloading other applications, Switchblade has more than enough features and functionality to justify its download.